rum, agony, complete carnage, noise and death

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Table Talk (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Anonymous (a retired, 79-year-old British man, who, at age eighteen, while serving in France during World War I, had survived crippling battlefield wounds), quoted in Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age. UK: Penguin Books, 1980, pp. 135-136—

[While serving in the trenches] we reached a line the Germans had just vacated and on the next morning, after being made to drink a lot of rum, I went over the top for the first time. Everybody has written about it and nobody can describe it. Not really. The legs and arms of the dead stretched out, the ripped bellies of the horses steaming and stinking. And the dead faces of mates looking up at you out of the filth. Filth. Men made into filth before your very eyes. “He’s finished,” you’d say to yourself, and in a way you were glad he was! Because there was this useless agony because you’d got to go. How I prayed then! “Over the top!” it was, and there you were, running and falling. After the first time I fell asleep in a trench filling with water and was nearly drowned. We were on the Somme. It was solid carnage, noise and death. There was so much death then that it doesn’t matter to me now. Or should I say, it doesn’t worry me now. Now that I’m getting on for eighty, and when there’s not a morning when I don’t thank God for it. Day come, day go.

she realized her father was damaged by war

Above Roy R. Behrens, Ebullience (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Lyn Lear, in Remar Sutton and Mary Abbott Waite, eds., The Common Ground: A Circle of Friends. Latham NY: British American Publishing, 1992, p. 47—

My dad was sick a lot after he came back from World War II. I remember him screaming in the middle of the night because of the nightmares. The whole house would shake.

We would sit and listen to him talk in his sleep about those terrible war events: his best friend getting blown up in front of him; fights. It was very dramatic. We would sit around and Mom would write all the dreams down. I realized then my father was damaged; I realized what the war had done to him. It was an insight into why my father was the way he was. It changed my relationship with him.